Winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2014
Shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2014
Imtiaz Dharker was born in Pakistan, grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow, was adopted by India and married into Wales. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror, and latterly, grief. She is also an accomplished artist, and all her collections are illustrated with her drawings, which form an integral part of her books.
Over the Moon is her fifth book from Bloodaxe. These are poems of joy and sadness, of mourning and celebration: poems about music and feet, church bells, beds, cafe tables, bad language and sudden silence. In contrast with her previous work written amidst the hubbub of India, these new poems are mostly set in London, where she has built a new life with - and since the death of - her husband Simon Powell.
'an incredibly poignant, heart-breaking account of grief, loss, renewal and moving on; the illustrations work with the poems in really surprising and beautiful ways.' --Helen Mort, on Over the Moon, Radio 4's World at One
'...poems that wound and sear the mind while also allowing an exorcism of the trappings of loss.' - Hayden Murphy, Glasgow Herald
'Set mainly in London, these poems can be as exuberant and as dark as the capital itself, and one of them includes the best line ever written about this uneasy, riparian foundation on the Thames.' - Nicholas Crane, Best Books, The Week [on Over the Moon]
Imtiaz Dharker grew up a 'Muslim Calvinist' in a Lahori household in Glasgow, was adopted by India and married into Wales. She is an accomplished artist and video filmmaker, and has seven poetry books with Bloodaxe, Postcards from god (including Purdah) (1997), I Speak for the Devil (2001), The terrorist at my table (2006), Leaving Fingerprints (2009), Over the Moon (2014), Luck Is the Hook (2018), and Shadow Reader (2024), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. All her poetry collections are illustrated with her drawings, which form an integral part of the books; she is one of very few poet-artists to work in this way. She was awarded The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry for 2014, presented to her by HM Queen Elizabeth in 2015, and has also received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Over the Moon was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2014. Her poems are on the British GCSE and A Level English syllabus, and she reads with other poets at Poetry Live! events all over the country to more than 35,000 students a year. She has had a dozen solo exhibitions of drawings in India, London, Leeds, New York and Hong Kong. She scripts and directs films, many of them for non-government organisations in India, working in the area of shelter, education and health for women and children. In 2015 she appeared on the iconic BBC Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs. In 2020 she was appointed Chancellor of Newcastle University. She lives in London.
